


Dancing the Woman

by nnozomi



Series: Noemi [1]
Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2012-09-10
Packaged: 2017-11-13 23:18:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/508818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Will you open the dancing, Milady? They're waiting." <i>Barrayar</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Dancing the Woman

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [ms_cataclysm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ms_cataclysm/pseuds/ms_cataclysm) in the [Bujold_Ficathon_2012](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Bujold_Ficathon_2012) collection. 



> For a prompt by ms_cataclysm, requesting "Kareen before Serg." Warning, unfortunately, for offstage Serg Vorbarra.

Dancing the Woman

 

sixteen

Kareen all but overbalanced during the spin, clinging ungracefully to the sides of Noemi’s dress to keep her feet. “Clumsy!” Madame Vordaille’s bird-squawk sounded from somewhere over by the piano.

“Me or you?” Noemi hissed down at her.

“Me. She always knows whose fault it is.”

“I wish my mother did. You might want to put your hands back in the accepted positions now.”

Kareen hurriedly did so, blushing. Noemi’s day dress was made of sturdy gabardine and had probably dealt with worse than the likes of her tugging on it, but it was having enough trouble holding in the solid rounds of Noemi’s bust and hips as it was.

“Just as well I’m not a good marriage prospect,” Noemi mused, as they began to revolve more sedately. “I’ve spent so much time dancing the man that I’ll probably try to lead the first partner I get at the Winterfair Ball.”

“Maybe you’ll get Manya Vorsafina’s brother. He’s shorter than me.”

“He won’t come within a league of me, then. It takes a real man to take on a tall woman, and I never thought Oleg Vorsafin accounted for much. He’ll be angling for you, like two out of every three men in the room.”

Kareen looked down, under the pretext of checking on her box-stepping feet. Being born beautiful was a Vor woman’s highest attainment—a pity it wasn’t something one could be proud of, not having worked for one’s genes—and one she had succeeded at. “I’d give half of them to you, any day,” she said. “Maybe even all of them.”

“Don’t want them, thanks. I’m resigned to being a spinster. I expect I’ll have a good time being eccentric when I get older. And it’s not as if my father were a Count and needed an heir.”

The reason Noemi’s marriage prospects were minimal—her mutant older brother, dead in his crib before she was born—did not need to be spoken between them. It didn’t help, either, that Vorliakou was such an uncamouflageably Greek name, or that Noemi was tall and hefty and solid with the traditional prominent nose and heavy eyebrows, all topped with incongruously soft, fine light brown hair.

“I’d marry—“ Kareen began, and broke off for another spin, concentrating this time so that she didn’t fall off her own heels. “I’d marry you if you were a man,” she offered, when the dance had brought them back face-to-face.

“Lord Vorsefta’s beautiful only daughter? Marry a Greekie with dubious genes? You should be so lucky,” Noemi dismissed this. “Your father’s got a Count’s heir in mind for you, at the very least.”

Kareen closed her eyes for a moment, opening them hurriedly again before she could trip over Noemi’s feet or her own. “Maybe I’ll get really lucky and it’ll be someone only, oh, ten or fifteen years older than I am. Who will be satisfied with four or five children instead of eight or ten.”

“Come on, this isn’t the Time of Isolation.”

“As long as it’s not that Vorrutyer man,” Kareen breathed, taking advantage of a burst of enthusiasm on the part of the pianist to keep her voice almost inaudible. “You remember my father took me to that big dinner party at Vorhalas House last month? He was there, and the way he looked at me…” She shivered involuntarily, almost slipping from between Noemi’s hands. “If he came courting, I honestly think I’d draw a brand across my face if it would discourage him.”

Noemi moved a hand adroitly from Kareen’s shoulderblade to her face, patting her cheek twice without breaking the rhythm of the dance. “I don’t advise it. I’ve heard a bit about Commander Vorrutyer from my cousins in the Service, and from what the soldiers say he’d probably be even more interested if you were disfigured. Anyway—“ she soothed Kareen’s quiver of horror with a brief chuckle—“gossip used to say he had his hands full already.”

“With?”

“Oh…a certain Count’s heir, who may or may not once have been his brother-in-law? Widowed in, er, suspicious circumstances some time back? You remember Lady Claire, back when we were little girls watching the dances.”

“Nice Vor girls don’t engage in that sort of gossip,” Kareen said with deliberate primness, relieved a little by Noemi’s casual tone. They both knew that nice girls did just that and then some, of course; it was all about how good your command of euphemisms was.

Noemi’s heavy eyebrows rose teasingly, but before she could go into more detail the pianist broke into the livelier rhythms of a mirror dance. Kareen’s upper hand slid automatically down from Noemi’s shoulder as they regrouped for the introduction. “Remember, if I trip this time you have to trip too.”

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten Paulette Vorlightly’s birthday party. Or ever will.”

Kareen felt her face heat, and then gave up and laughed. Two years ago now. Paulette’s fourteenth birthday in the Long Gallery of the big Vorlightly mansion, two dozen Vor young ladies (ranging from the still tiny and flat-chested, like little doll-faced Aemine Vortorren, to the already adult-tall and mature but inevitably gawky, like Paulette herself) dancing waltzes, sets and mirror dances together: a trial run for the mixed-sex parties they would soon be old enough to attend.

Kareen had grown four inches and put on ten pounds that year, and as a result had been even more prone to trip over things than she was now. Noemi had claimed her for the mirror dance (interrogated later, she’d said she wanted a partner within six inches of her own height, to avoid backaches), and mimicked Kareen faithfully when she stumbled. Kareen, trying to copy in return Noemi’s more exaggerated motion, stepped on the hem of her partner’s dress; Noemi, unprepared, leaned the wrong way to compensate; Kareen, off-balance, took an even more injudicious step; and there they were in an undignified splash of full skirts, lacy petticoats, limbs every which way, and unmoored hair, sprawled across the floor with Paulette, her mother, and all her other guests staring at them.

They had struggled to their feet in two separate clouds of bitter humiliation, parted by Lady Vorlightly’s gently ironic voice suggesting a trip to the garderobes to repair hairstyles and hems. 　Side by side but not speaking, they hurried out, both on the verge of tears. Once there, though, their eyes met irresistibly in the mirror, and it was a good quarter hour before either of them could stop giggling for long enough to speak coherently.

Kareen sighed now, resorting to one of the more conventional mirror dance step-and-slides. “I was out the other day—remember when it was so warm last week? You almost didn’t need a coat? I went to that little shop on Nadezhkina Avenue, you know, Madame Corneille’s, for some hair clasps.”

“The ones you’re wearing now?”

Kareen reached up automatically to touch her hair (Noemi didn’t fail to mirror the gesture) and felt cool glass beads. “No, these are the old ones from my grandmother, I wanted some purple ones to go with my new dance dress. They’re making them so that you can clasp flowers into them now, in the new style.”

“Silly fashion,” Noemi muttered. “Killing off half a garden at a go every time there’s a dance, so the girls can wear real flowers in their hair to be sweated on by drunken Vor lieutenants and lordlings—“

“You sound just like my grandmother, you know that?” They both laughed. “Anyway,” Kareen resumed, “the construction over the monorail line is finally finished.” She paused as Noemi threw in a box step and a dip, and mirrored with due care. “So I had a look at it from the bridge.”

The new bridge made a humpbacked arch over the train lines, meaning that pedestrians on Vorstarffin Road had a steep uphill slog followed by a sudden downhill plunge. Still, there had been more than a few people standing at either side of the lookout area at the top, leaning on the stone railings and contemplating the monorail lines in fascination.

Kareen reached the apex well ahead of her duenna, who had been growing steadily rounder over the last ten years, and had insisted on wearing full winter rig into the bargain. Waiting for Cecille to catch up, she found an unoccupied space along the railing, between a prole girl about her own age, wearing a factory-work pinafore and a crown of braids, and a late-fiftyish enlisted man in fatigues. Both were watching absorbed as a monorail car slid cautiously along its track below, all shiny silver with stylish (and rather military-looking) dark green flashes on each side. It would have glittered in the sun if the clouds overhead had parted a little.

“Where’s it going then?” the girl asked no one in particular. She had a backcountry accent, maybe Vorkosigan’s District or Vorfolse’s.

“Isn’t going nowhere yet, miss,” the yeoman on Kareen’s far side answered, speaking across her without discourtesy. “Still working out the kinks down there. See them men with flags, and them little hand-meters?” (Kareen followed his gestures along with the other girl: men in the new Imperial Rail livery were scattered at brief intervals along the tracks, all apparently talking at once into hand-held communicators while they took various mysterious measurements.) “Got to make sure it’s working right and proper before they send it out anywhere, haven’t they?”

“Pity. I been hoping I could go home by train for Winterfair this year, if I saved my pennies.”

The yeoman chuckled hoarsely. “You’ll want to wait a bit, miss. That line down there don’t go but to Vordarian’s District yet. Takes time and men to lay track, you know, even say it’s only one rail.” His face turned thoughtful. “Wonder if the Imperial Rail’s hiring crew chiefs. I’ll have my twice-twenty come a year from Emperor’s Birthday; I could do worse…”

The girl sighed. “Backcountry never gets the breaks. I best go on now before the foreman comes looking for me.” She sketched a curtsey at the yeoman (Kareen’s Vor-lady-trained instincts passed judgment automatically on the bend of her knees, the angle of her back, her grip on her skirt) and moved toward the downhill slope. After a few steps, she turned back, pushing aside stray wisps of hair, and bobbed her head self-consciously in Kareen’s general direction before starting to walk again.

The yeoman continued to frown down over the railing, now obviously appraising the track crew’s work with much the same would-be professional eye that Kareen had turned on the girl’s curtsey. Kareen drifted over to the other side of the bridge and gazed at the long straight line of the rail, seeming to darken as it approached the horizon, heading away to the shuttleports in Vordarian’s District and, eventually, far beyond.

Cecille achieved the summit at that point, puffing and fanning her face with her coat collar, and they moved on.

In the dancing room, Noemi snapped her fingers in front of Kareen’s nose; Kareen blinked and then made haste to mirror the gesture, earning a squawk of “Girls, remember what is _ladylike_!” from Madame Vordaille. “So the monorail?” Noemi prompted, making Kareen realize she’d been staring into space and recalling the scene.

“Oh. I was just thinking how much I’d like to ride it somewhere. Imagine, a train would be different from a carriage or a lightflyer, you could just ride along until you felt like getting off, and then get back on whenever you felt like it. Around the world if you wanted.”

Possibly inspired by the last phrase, Noemi took Kareen lightly by shoulder and waist and spun her once around, giving it enough torque to make her skirt flare. Kareen glared, slightly dizzy, and returned the favor as the dance demanded, but she didn’t have enough mass compared to Noemi’s to create the same effect. Fortunately, the music was beginning on the statelier phrases which suggested an end to the dance in sight.

“Let’s go and ride it sometime, then,” Noemi proposed finally, keeping her voice down. “No parents or duennas, just two young ladies seeing the new Barrayar.”

“They’d never let us,” Kareen said flatly. “Anyway, the really long-distance lines won’t be finished for years,” remembering the girl on the bridge. “We’ll both be married and mothers by then.” _Or at least I will_ , but she wouldn’t say that.

Noemi shrugged, making an elaborate two-handed gesture of it so that Kareen had to do it too. “So we wait a few decades, what of it? Women don’t die in childbirth at thirty-five these days. I expect you to be waiting for me on the platform at Vorbarr Sultana Station when we’re sixty or so, and you’re a dowager and I’m an eccentric old maid. Are you in?”

“Think of how much newer the new Barrayar will be by then,” Kareen reflected, smiling in spite of herself with the pleasure of the distant fantasy. “I suppose given forty-odd years’ advance warning, I could manage to make it on time.” As the dance music drew to a close, she spread her skirts and sank almost to the floor in front of Noemi, in a flawless Vor-lady curtsey, returned by her friend with less grace but equal feeling.

 

twenty-two

“Milady?”

Early Vor training was good for something after all; Kareen’s flinches were all interior. She wondered how long it would take before complete numbness took over and she stopped reacting even inwardly. Would she have to experience all the possible stimuli before she could become numb to everything? Could she get them all over with more quickly, so as to hasten the deadening effect? But if _he_ thought she had any such intention, he would take longer over everything…draw minutes out to tormented hours, days to weeks or months, years to decades…

“Milady?”

This time she registered the maid’s voice consciously, and answered with cool dignity, as if she hadn’t been staring into space. “Yes, Olla?”

“A letter for you, milady.” The other woman, probably several years older than Kareen herself, was holding one of those elegant little silver trays, with a cream envelope resting on it.

Kareen did not shift position, did not reach out to the tray, did not crane her neck. “A letter from whom?”

Olla bent her head slightly to the envelope. “Miss Noemi Vorliakou, milady.”

Kareen glanced at the maid’s face briefly, then away, uninterested, unemphatic. “You may return it as it is to Miss Vorliakou,” she said, indifferently. “Or dispose of it as you will. I see no need to read it.” The cool, haughty tone was the best imitation her soprano could manage of _his_ tenor voice.

“Yes, milady.” Olla curtsied deeply. Kareen heard the door close behind her.

She went on looking out the window, satisfied that the courtyard outside did not blur even slightly. Her body was the only tool she had, more so now than it had ever been, and it was necessary to maintain perfect control over it. No more tripping.

Some time after the letters ceased coming, she heard, in passing at a soirée, about that Vorliakou girl, the big one, leaving the capital to stay at her family’s estate out in Vorharopoulos District. Something about _Greeks of a feather_ , which produced titters, and then another voice, softer, murmuring _Better a tainted line should…_ .

Kareen let her breath out long and slow, knowing her elaborate bodice was laced too tight to show anything. She had let go at the right moment this time; _he_ wouldn’t come near Noemi now, because he wouldn’t know. Even _he_ couldn’t know everything.

She was a better dancer now. She wouldn’t bring anyone else down with her. The mirror dance was over.

 

twenty-seven

It took every ounce of the control she’d ground into herself to keep her trembling invisible. Damn Ezar for doing this to her, taking away her ice-numbness and making her go back to the potential of pain…no, that had happened already, there was no cure for that, she’d lost that hollow safety the day Gregor was born. Ezar was teaching her other ways not to fall, she told herself, and drew breath the way the midwives had taught her.

“Oh, and one more thing,” he added, and murmured something to Captain Negri, at his shoulder as always. Negri spoke unintelligibly into his wristcom. The little door behind opened, with that awful ImpSec silence, and a woman emerged, ducking her head to miss the doorframe.

She was Negri’s height, easily, and built strong as a wrestler, although the dress she wore—the dull blue-gray common to higher Residence servants—looked as if it was hampering what should have been easily graceful movements. Blond hair was scraped ruthlessly back from her face and pinned up in a small hard bun. She looked hardly old enough to be out of school.

Ezar waved a hand idly in her direction, and the woman curtsied almost to the floor. “Kareen, this is your new bodyguard—oh, sorry, Servant of the Inner Chamber. What’s your name again, girl?”

“Droushnakovi, Sir,” the woman answered, in a surprisingly soft, tentative voice.

“This is Miss Droushnakovi. She will be with you and Prince Gregor at all times, as your last line of defense against…whatever you may need defense from.” The two unspoken names jangled in the moment of silence. “She’s Negri’s handpicked best, so you should have no worries about her quality.” Negri gave a slight nod, his eyes drilling into the woman. “You’ve had your orders, Miss Droushnakovi.”

“Yes, Sir.” The woman curtsied again, this time to Kareen. “Yours to command, milady.”

Kareen met her eyes, considering. She trusted Ezar, for reasons she didn’t want to think hard about ever again; Ezar trusted Negri, if he trusted anyone; Negri, apparently, trusted this girl. Therefore, transitively, Kareen might trust her as well. Or not. Events would tell the tale. “Then let us go, Miss Droushnakovi. I shall introduce you to my son.” She made her own curtsey to Ezar, and turned to leave the room.

Miss Droushnakovi was entirely silent on the walk back to Kareen’s own suite, but the tall, solid presence at her shoulder was unexpectedly familiar. There might even come a time, Kareen reflected, when she might come to find it reassuring, like the support of a dance partner ready to bring her back into balance.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize to the prompter for including a good portion of Kareen after Serg as well.  
> The Vorkosiverse timeline by Tel was very helpful in working out relative ages and events.  
> This fic is unbeta'd; if anyone notices, and would like to point out, gross discrepancies with canon or other infelicities, please let me know and I will edit accordingly.


End file.
